Video: Working with archival images

In this movie I will show you how to work with archival images, that is photographs that you've modified using Camera Raw 6 or earlier. And I have two such images here, Lighthouse-1 and Lighthouse-2. I will select them both in Bridge and press Ctrl+R or Cmd+R on a Mac in order to open them in Camera Raw. Now I want to preserve my previous modifications just in case I want to come back to them. And you can do that by creating snapshots. So I will press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A on the Mac to select both images. And then I will switch to the final panel here by clicking on the snapshots icon.

The third part of the popular and comprehensive series Photoshop CS6 One-on-One follows industry pro Deke McClelland as he plunges into the inner workings of Adobe Photoshop. He shows how to adjust your color, interface, and performance settings to get the best out of your images and the most out of Photoshop, and explores the power of Smart Objects, Shadows/Highlights, and Curves for making subtle, nondestructive adjustments. The course dives into Camera Raw to experiment with the editing toolset there, and returns to Photoshop to discuss toning, blur, and blend modes. Deke also teaches tried-and-true methods for sharpening details and reducing noise, as well as creating quick and accurate selections with Quick Mask, Color Range, and Refine Edge commands.

Working with archival images

In this movie I will show you how to work with archival images, that is photographs that you've modified using Camera Raw 6 or earlier. And I have two such images here, Lighthouse-1 and Lighthouse-2. I will select them both in Bridge and press Ctrl+R or Cmd+R on a Mac in order to open them in Camera Raw. Now I want to preserve my previous modifications just in case I want to come back to them. And you can do that by creating snapshots. So I will press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A on the Mac to select both images. And then I will switch to the final panel here by clicking on the snapshots icon.

And I will dropdown to the little Page icon and click on it, and I'll call these settings ACR6 edits because after all I modified the images in Adobe Camera Raw 6 which shipped along with Photoshop CS5. And then I will click OK in order to that snapshot. Now notice even though the snapshot appears here inside the Snapshots panel where this image is concerned, if I press the Down Arrow key in order to switch to the next image I see no snapshot. And that's because snapshots is that one thing that you can only do to one image at a time even if multiple images are selected.

So once again dropdown to the Page icon, click on it, enter ACR6 edits and then click OK. All right, now let's go ahead and switch back to the Basic panel. And these images are so different, I'm going to have to modify them independently. I only selected both of them so you could see that snapshots thing. So I will just go ahead and click on Lighthouse-1 and select it. And notice this little Exclamation Point (!) in the lower right corner of the screen. That shows me that this image has been modified in the previous version of Camera Raw and therefore I'm seeing completely different sliders.

The old ones in fact, Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, and Contrast. In order to switch things up for the Camera Raw 6 controls you need to click on that Exclamation Point, and then we will see Exposure, Contrast, Highlights and so forth. Now what Camera Raw is trying to do is the best job possible of matching the previous effect. So it's gone ahead and automatically dialed in a few values here. But I want to start over again, so I will go ahead and click on default so you can see just how bad this image was in the first place.

And the first thing I am going to do is adjust the Exposure, Whites, and Blacks controls. So I will take that Exposure value up to say 0.5 which gives the image a little extra brightness. And you'll find that sort of modest exposure adjustments tend to work best. And now I figure the Blacks value is fine the way it is. If I Alt+Drag or Opt+Drag on the slider triangle you can see that we already have some clipping at work here, so best just to leave it alone. However, I have plenty of room were the Whites are concerned. So I will go ahead and Alt+Drag or Opt+Drag on the White slider triangle until I start to see some clipping which happens at about +60, you can see a little bit of clipping in the top right portion of the image.

Now I figure we have a little bit too much contrast where this image is concerned, so I will just take the contrast value down to -50 and then I could breathe some life into the shadows because after all we've got some pretty dark shadows underneath the top of this tower. And I do so of course by dragging up on the Shadows value, but that ends up washing out the rest of the image so I am going to leave that thing set to 0. Instead, I will go ahead and press Ctrl+0 or Cmd+0 on the Mac to zoom out. I am going to take that Highlights value all the way down to -100.

And that ends up muting those highlights so that they are not nearly so garish. All right I think the scene needs a little additional color. So I am going to go down to the Saturation value, maybe bump it up to let's say 20. And then I'll Shift+Tab back to the Vibrance value and take it up to 30. So we end up with this very cheerful scene, especially given that it used to look like this, that is to say the image I get when I click on the Default button, if I want to get back my changes, which I desperately do, then I can just press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac, you have one level of undo inside Camera Raw.

Now if I want to compare this to my ACR6 settings then I'd just go ahead and switch over to snapshots, take a moment to go ahead save a new snapshot. By clicking on the Page icon I will enter ACR7 edits this time, and then I will click OK. So this is what I had before in the previous version of Photoshop. Looks pretty good but I don't think as good as what I'm getting now. Thanks to my Exposure controls here inside Camera Raw 7. We will see a more dramatic difference if we switch over here to Lighthouse-2.

If I go back to Basic panel here and click on Default, you'll see that this image was in terrible shape, this is that classic image that has blown highlights all over the place. So if I press the Alt key and drag on that Exposure triangle, you can see that we have white all over that sky, those are highlights that are really super blown out. So with the Alt key down I will just go ahead and drag this slider triangle over until most of the clipping goes away which happens in the Exposure of about -1.00.

And that ends up bringing back the sky quite nicely, so we have all kinds of detail inside those clouds now that we didn't have just a moment ago. However, it really darkens up that lighthouse. Now I have made a mistake, by the way, I was going to tab down to Contrast right there, but instead its Recovery. And the reason is I didn't update to the new Camera Raw 7 controls. So we will click on the Exclamation Point in the lower right corner of the image and now I'm seeing what things look like with an Exposure of -1, so went ahead and kept that value and everything else zeroed out.

All right, now I will select that Contrast value and take it down to -25. And I want to really brighten up those shadows. So I will drag this slider triangle up until I get the Shadows value of +80 is what I'm looking for. And that brightens up the lighthouse as well as the ground quite nicely. And then I'll take the highlights down further by reducing this Highlights value to -50, and we ended bringing even more detail out in those clouds. And now we don't have any clipping at all. Both the Shadow Clipping warning and the Highlight Clipping warning appear black, meaning not even a single pixel is clipped.

But we have so little contrast at this point and we can fix that using the Blacks and Whites sliders. So I'm going to start with Whites, I will press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and drag that triangle until I start to see clipping which occurs right about at +30. And then I'll Alt+Drag or Opt+Drag Blacks and you can take that one all the way down to -100 and get just a little bit of clipping as you are seeing on screen. But I decided to back it off to -80 like so. And then I took that Saturation value up to 50 and I am going to take the Vibrance value up to 50 as well so that we have this very colorful ground and sky as you can see.

All right, so just to see the difference here, if I click on Default we'll see the original version of the image, it's just horrible by comparison. And then if I press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac we see the much better version here. And by the way you also have this Clarity slider that we haven't seen before, that creates big thick Edge Contrast. So if you drag it all the way down, you get this kind of Thomas Kinkade Effect if you will, bless his heart. And then if you increase that value like crazy you end up creating a kind of haunted lighthouse.

Anyway, I am just going to leave that guy set to 0. Now I will switch back over to Snapshots so we can compare ACR7 to ACR6 and I will dropdown to little Page icon, click on it, enter a name for the snapshot like ACR7 edits, click OK. So here's what we had at the outset of this movie. Better than the original, that's for sure, but our new edits are that much better. All right, now I will just go ahead and click done in order to accept my modifications and update the thumbnails here inside Bridge.

And that's how you work with archival images as well as snapshots in Camera Raw 7.

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